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In 1912, Braque and Picasso inaugurated synthetic Cubism with collages containing natural, everyday objects. However, the development and popularization of collage owes its success to Dada, Futurism, Surrealism and Pop Art. The one thing that united these divergent movements was their anti-bourgeois and anti-academic stance, their sole method: provocation. In the photomontage Life picture of 1970/72, Hannah Höch clearly placed the Dompteuse (tamer) – a 20th-century political and feminist icon – between socially critical pictures of upheaval and resignation. Shortly before the seizure of power by the National Socialists, the androgynous “new woman” figure of the Dompteuse embodies the hope of achieving a balance of the democratic forces, and their return to the fundamental unity of anima and animus.